Union still furious over clerk’s proposal to make firing public servants easier

The head of the second-largest federal union can’t let go of the top bureaucrat’s suggestion to make it easier to fire public servants in the wake of the Phoenix pay fiasco.

Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), came out swinging at Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick in June when he first suggested Parliament change public service employment laws to make it easier to fire employees for poor performance, mismanagement and misconduct.

“In the wake of the Phoenix pay crisis, it is no comfort to public service employees to hear from their clerk that firing them is too difficult,” she wrote. “At times like these, my members would prefer to see leadership and vision on how to move forward and ensure employees are paid correctly and on time.”

But Daviau isn’t the only one disappointed with Wernick’s response to the pay debacle.

A recent Senate report said Wernick’s views “don’t address what went wrong with Phoenix” and he failed to explain how making it easier to fire people would have affected the management of Phoenix.

The Senate report took aim at the culture of the public service and the lack of oversight of Privy Council Office and Treasury Board – two central agencies that are supposed to monitor the risks of a large project like Phoenix.

“We are disappointed that the clerk did not acknowledge that there may be a cultural problem in the public service,” said the report by the Senate’s national finance committee.

“The government needs to move away from a culture that plays down bad news and avoids responsibility, to one that encourages employee engagement, feedback and collaboration.”

There’s no indication that Parliament is interested in pursuing Wernick’s suggestion.

It’s also unclear whether Ferguson’s pleas to fix the culture of the public service before more Phoenix-like failures occur will get any traction when Parliament returns in the fall. That’s a tall order for a government to tackle in the year running up to the 2019 election.

The debate triggered by Ferguson’s report shows just how far apart the unions, employees and management are when it comes to fixing the ‘broken’ culture he argued was at the heart of the Phoenix debacle.

Ferguson argued the public service has developed a culture of avoiding risks and dodging blame for mistakes. As a result, they avoid sending bad news up the chain of command – particularly when ministers have let it known they don’t want to hear about problems.

Wernick has acknowledged the public service is too risk averse, driven by process and rules and needs to be more innovative, creative and assertive. But he argued that Ferguson unfairly generalized the mismanagement of a handful of Phoenix executives as a sign of a widespread cultural problem.

Federal executives and unions alike have argued the difficulties in firing employees has more to do with poor performance management than the bar being too high to sack non-performers.

They argue that making it easier to fire people will backfire and put a chill on the honest and fearless advice public servants are expected to provide. Public servants aren’t sending bad news up the hierarchy now because of fear of reprisal or being labelled as a trouble-maker.

In her letter Daviau said that Wernick should stop lamenting how hard it is to fire people and instead push to protect employees with better whistleblower laws and end bullying and harassment in the workplace.

Daviau said Wernick’s claim that it too difficult to fire public servants is “inaccurate” and bad for morale. The number of public servants fired for misconduct increased 67 per cent since 2005-06; those sacked for incompetence or incapacity jumped 57 per cent.

At the same time, she pointed to the public service employee survey, which over the years reveals persistent problem of harassment and bullying among nearly 20 per cent of employees despite management efforts to root it out of the workforce.

The Trudeau government largely rejected a legislative overhaul of federal whistleblower legislation recommended by the government operations committee several years ago. Advocates arged the preforms would have helped to change the culture of fear stopping bureaucrats from coming forward with allegations of wrongdoing.

PIPSC Vice-President Steve Hindle said many people knew Phoenix was in trouble. Unions, employees, managers, IBM and the Gartner report all raised red flags, but no one was willing to step outside the line of authority.

“We know people inside the public service knew there were problems and serious enough problems they would have told someone if they thought they could have,” said Hindle.

“Why didn’t the Gartner report show up in a minister’s office, a newspaper or on a Facebook post? …Most likely the person who released it would have been punished and had no protection.”

The Public Service Alliance of Canada has asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call a public inquiry into the Phoenix pay disaster and the culture in the public service that led to the colossal failure.